Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

[Soul_of_Shu]

I'd suggest that Ashvin has hit upon a very simple and powerful teaching ... There is only one Awareness. Thou art That. Everything else, without exception, is what that Awareness is addicted to. Give it all up and that Awareness remains. And yet can it be given up? There's the rub.

[Lou Gold]

I'd suggest that Ashvin has hit upon a very simple and powerful teaching ... There is only one Awareness. Thou art That. Everything else, without exception, is what that Awareness is addicted to. Give it all up and that Awareness remains. And yet can it be given up? There's the rub.

Or:

Translated into the lingo of BK's Idealism, the Dissociated Identity Disorder dies and is resurrected as the Divinely Integrated Diversity. Who DID it? The One DID.

[Lou Gold]

Translated into the lingo of BK's Idealism, the Dissociated Identity Disorder dies and is resurrected as the Divinely Integrated Diversity. Who DID it? The One DID.

also:

One of the best takes I've recently seen on "Can it be given up?" is found in the Ibn' Arabi poem. "If we find the path of separation, we will destroy it." In other words, it can only be done co-creatively.

Another take, which I have not seen discussed here, is the liberation spin on the Narcissus Myth in which it is precisely the addiction that leads to the death of the false self or, in the words of Blake, "The only way to find out how much is enough is to find out how much is more than enough."

[Soul_of_Shu]

Here's the take I'm going with ... If it can't be forsaken, then not wanting it is a moot point. In which case, what's to be done with it, but to make of it something good and beautiful? I can imagine no more worthy telos.

[Lou Gold]

Here's the take I'm going with ... If it can't be forsaken, then not wanting it is a moot point. In which case, what's to be done with it, but to make of it something good and beautiful? I can imagine no more worthy telos.

EXACTLY! The challenge is not to conquer the unconquerable, as the very effort to do so will give it more energetic juice, but to hold it lovingly in right relationship. In other words, "war will never make peace." As with fire, too close will get you burned and too far will freeze your butt. Creating a good and worthy soup with fire and water requires a pot. Wrestling intellectually with paradox creates endless complexities where using a pot makes it simple. KISS and DONE DEAL!

[ScottRoberts]

Wrestling intellectually with paradox creates endless complexities where using a pot makes it simple. KISS and DONE DEAL!

What's wrong with endless complexities? Keep it simple-complex, I say, and avoid Done Deals.

[Lou Gold]

Wrestling intellectually with paradox creates endless complexities where using a pot makes it simple. KISS and DONE DEAL!

What's wrong with endless complexities? Keep it simple-complex, I say, and avoid Done Deals.

Nothing wrong with paradox and its marvelously creative tensions, which are resolved by making love not war. However, I should emphasize that 'Done Deals' are always temporary, pauses along the Way, in the Now as they say. The way to keep it simple-complex is to not get caught in the abstractions.

[Lou Gold]

PS: The letting go of the "me and mine" is not a letting go of the "I". It is a letting go of the grasping attachment to separation. The thus liberated "I" and the "One" unite and there no longer exists an "Other". Translated into the lingo of BK's Idealism, the Dissociated Identity Disorder dies and is resurrected as the Divinely Integrated Diversity. Who DID it? The One DID.

I see, Lou. First, I would like to affirm once again, that I'm not writing these things in any personal relation to you. I'm pretty certain that in your life you've had much greater positive impact on people around you, than me. So I'm not at all trying to tell that you are wrong or something like that. There's no wrong Love. We're just using our dialog as context, so that certain things can be said, which I find relevant.

I've had my share of psychedelic experiences so I can speak for myself. I'm just sharing personal experiences in the context of the discussion.

Once serious work in meditation (not the no-mind/no-self kind) is started, it quickly becomes clear that there are many things that substances can never reveal to us. Most importantly, they can't teach us how to be active within the higher realm.

When we approach the letting go, things go as Lou said (the quote). We can describe the spiritual activity prior to that, to be felt as somewhat "jagged", having "sharp" edges, constantly bouncing and our thinking self lives within this activity. It rises above the general substance as thought forms. That's the separateness. With the letting go, these hectic thought forms subside and we find ourselves in a smooth, fluid-like flow. Something very characteristic of this state is that there's no more movement of attention. It's like our focus is spread over the totality of the world content. Everything is in focus at the same time. We no longer feel as if we are at one point and need to move our focus of perception between separate elements.

In this state there are no sharp boundaries and that's what justifies us to speak of Oneness. Nevertheless, this state represents a certain individual perspective. If we are objective, we would never claim, for example, that in this oneness we experience the consciousnesses of all human being as overlaid one over the other and experienced as One. We can have a strong feeling, experienced as understanding, that the substance we flow in, is the same for all beings but nevertheless we still experience only a perspective, a limited sphere of the substance.

Once we set on to work on higher cognition, we gradually discover that our "I" can be active within this substance, which in modern terms is called astral. It should be noted that the letting go of the thinking self happens in quite different way in meditation. This holds the key, which allows us to experience the transition between the lower activity and the higher. It'll take us too far to describe this in details.

When we experience the astral in this way we gradually become aware that, even though the substance if smooth, there are no sharp boundaries and everything is "in focus", there are still different domains of the substance. We find out that there are parts that we can influence while others are much more independent. That's how we become aware of the "I" within this realm. The principle is the same as in normal cognition where we experience thoughts which we recognize as something that we control, while various perceptions meet us as something independent. We learn to do something similar in the astral but there everything is in constant metamorphosis, we can not draw sharp boundaries and say "this is me, this is not me". Processes flow into each other. But nevertheless, we can still gain self-consciousness as an active spiritual being and the parts that seem to be outside our control, we recognize as being influenced by other beings. So it turns out that things are not merged in a homogenous soup of oneness but the astral fluid is being modulated, worked on, by spirits which can be recognized as being quite individual - just as we are experiencing an individual perspective within this realm. It is really the case that the jagged forms of the thinking ego have been overcome and we are flowing in the smooth substance but our "I" is now finding ways to recognize its reflection even within this constant motion.

It should be noted that everything we say about astral "substance" and so on, can only have a pictorial meaning. The experiences that we are describing are something specific in themselves, just like color and tone are specific experiences. All these descriptions are nothing but pictorial analogies so we shouldn't try getting too literal about them.

When the differentiation of our activity is made, we can already speak of the astral body. It is not something that we see externally in the way we see the physical with our eyes but we live within it, our spiritual activity flows with it and we recognize that we have influence in certain parts and practically no influence as we go towards "the periphery" so to speak. The parts that we can be most active in, gradually become more and more distinguishable. We recognize these as the astral or soul organs that are most popularly known as chakras or lotus flowers. Again - we don't see these organs in the way they are usually portrayed in pictures, as colorful flowers along the center line of the body. There's full justification that they are pictured like that but in the higher realm we experience them from the "inside" so to speak. As a matter of fact, the more the perceptions related to the physical body are driven away, the more the soul organs can be pictured as spheres within spheres. They have their specific contributions for the total "volume" of our conscious experience.

Just for an example, it is interesting to experience the workings of the organ that is pictured in the larynx. In our normal life we feel our consciousness in the head, there are our thoughts and perceptions. We do hear our thinking voice but the perceptions of that voice are in head. As we rise towards the experiences in the astral, our normal consciousness becomes "delaminated", so to speak. We are much more able to distinguish what comes from where. Very important observation is how our thinking activity flows from the larynx organ. It should be noted that there's no point to look for direct physical/neuronal projection of this process. Our nervous system is the mirror, so to speak, where thoughts can become sensory-like perceptible. The head soul organ (the two-petal lotus) is most closely related with the nervous system and primarily the brain. Within the astral we can observe how thoughts are being formed with the sphere of the larynx and emanate as something akin to sound waves but these are waves in astral substance. As these waves interfere with the head organ, they condense, so to speak, to thought perceptions. In certain sense it can be said, that we rise to higher cognition when we are able to withhold the condensation of thoughts within the head and learn to experience ourselves within the activity prior to that. Interesting analogy can be made with the help of quantum terminology, where we can say that we become conscious within the process prior to the collapse of the wave function within the brain. But this is only an expression, it shouldn't be taken too far because it can become misleading in many ways. Higher experiences stand for what they are, we don't need theory to explain them. We simply have to describe them.

I guess all that can be a little too much for most readers. I know that things like this come like out-of-the-blue and it is perfectly normal that they are met with great suspicion. In fact, it would be harmful if one simply "believes" something like that. These things are not be believed but thought about. When they are thought about from the most varied angles they begin to make sense. The reason is that our thinking is itself a spiritual process that exists within the processes and organs described. The astral body and world are not somewhere else in a remote domain. Every ordinary thought is being formed within the larynx organ, although, to be sure, spiritual activity is not "generated" within the larynx, it only gets shaped there and continues towards the head where it reaches the level of sense perceptibility. Our spiritual activity emerges from the mysterious depths. There's always something that is beyond our perception. Nevertheless, proper cognition within the astral body reveals many processes that occur at every instant of our life but we are simply not conscious of them. They lie in the subconsciousness from our ordinary perspective. It is just that the normally developed human being of today is naturally sensitive to the thoughts only when they interfere with the physico-etheric brain. A special work needs to be done if we are to develop our sensitivity for the prior processes. Yet it is not needed that one develops higher cognition himself, in order to be able to understand descriptions like the above. If we live vividly through such descriptions we are practically experiencing the same soul configurations as these which the one who perceived the processes, lived in, in order to describe them.

Let me try to explain this with a simple analogy. Imagine that astral body is represented by a dark room with all kinds of furniture and obstacles inside. The one who has developed perception for the interior can be metaphorically said, to be equipped with night vision goggles. He can say to someone else "Here, there's a table, here's a chair" and sure enough another man, even if he can't see, can touch the furniture and see that there's indeed logic in what he's being told. This is severely simplified example but it is nevertheless something similar in regards to higher cognition. When one livingly thinks through genuine descriptions of higher experiences, he basically repeats the same forms of spiritual activity that the seer does. In other words, our thinking becomes a kind of a touch organ, through which we can experience the "geometry" of our spiritual being.

I feel uneasy to write about these things, especially when knowing with how much prejudice they are normally met. But in the context of our discussion I felt it to be somewhat necessary to at least point the attention towards these things. Otherwise we get lost in generalities. There comes time when we have to speak concretely about things. What I have described is really one the most basic experiences that one confronts on this path of development. It is nothing miraculous. Yet things like these should at least be heard of. We need to counterbalance the hegemony of no-self/no-thought spirituality. It must be known that life does not end with the balancing of the head soul organ and quieting of the larynx organ (of course the heart organ is enormously important too but it would've taken us too far to speak of it too). The so called enlightenment of today is nothing but very specific configuration of the heart, larynx and head organs. Certain state of tranquility is established, where we experience the astral body similar to a calm sea. Since the jagged thinking activity within the dual mirror of the head ceases, with it ceases the ordinary self-perception. This state is considered to give us the ground truth of reality.

I hope that it was possible to at least hint, that things are not that simple. In fact, they are very complex. This is another popular prejudice in relation to the Spiritual - that it should be simple. And this is the task that lies ahead of humanity. Only through penetrating into our spiritual structure we can gain true self-knowledge. Only there we can understand, among other things, something about the mystery of evil. As long as we try to "fix" the world through purely external means, we'll always be sabotaged by certain beings. Actually these beings can be most effective when people think that they don't exist. That's when they become most powerful because people believe that they are doing their own will. The evolution of man is evolution of consciousness. And this is not something that we should expect to happen in the beyond (afterlife) but we must do it here and now. There's no distinct beyond. There's only one world. If we don't find the spiritual within the physical world, we'll be just as confused in the period between death and birth. And we can see how many difficulties we have at hand. While spirituality is being generalized as joyful merging with the all-that-is, we remain completely oblivious of our own spiritual structure and the path that we should tread. This joyful merging is only the experience of the astral body within its domain. And we haven't even mentioned the higher realms which require even higher degrees of consciousness in order to be perceived.

Hi Cleric,

Sorry for my delayed response and yes, of course, I know there's nothing personal or intentionally critical in the way you've been dialoguing with me. We've both just been articulating and honing our ways and sharing here with others. I read through your lengthy piece a couple times. I saw areas where I agree and other areas where I thought we were missing each other and other areas where I disagree. I thought and felt about how I wanted to respond, what verbal scaffold and platform I might use and honestly nothing felt right to me. I just didn't want to do it. So I called intuitively for another way and the following video came. Maybe it will have relevance for you or others, maybe not. It worked for me.

[Cleric K]

Hi Cleric,

Sorry for my delayed response and yes, of course, I know there's nothing personal or intentionally critical in the way you've been dialoguing with me. We've both just been articulating and honing our ways and sharing here with others. I read through your lengthy piece a couple times. I saw areas where I agree and other areas where I thought we were missing each other and other areas where I disagree. I thought and felt about how I wanted to respond, what verbal scaffold and platform I might use and honestly nothing felt right to me. I just didn't want to do it. So I called intuitively for another way and the following video came. Maybe it will have relevance for you or others, maybe not. It worked for me.

Thanks Lou,

Actually I'm glad that you disagree. This shows that you feel I'm speaking of something else. It would be much more challenging if you felt that's it's all the same. Because this is a very common trend today. People intuitively feel that at some point everything converges. Even physics tries to find the point of convergence of the fundamental forces. Unfortunately, humanity is constantly being prowled by a beast that we can call "premature universalization". This leads to thinking that is impatient and wants to get over it, to find the state where it's all one and done (related to Scott's remark about the done deals).

My point in the previous post was fairly simple. It was not about giving some comprehensive descriptions of the soul organs but only to hint about a direction. I liked the video above - very constructive. Adyashanti made very important statement that we are always in a relative state, that in the final run it's important what impact our insights and ideas have on practical life.

What I tried to hint in the previous post is that popular ideas of enlightenment, even if they lead to much personal growth, can in themselves turn into a ceiling that caps the potential of the human Spirit. It is nice that Adyashanti mentioned that nothingness is actual potentiality. And here we have a potential dichotomy. As long as we conceive the sea of potentiality as an amalgamation of being, of undifferentiated spiritual substance, we condition ourselves for the kinds of experiences that we seek in meditation or other methods. Spiritual cognition begins from the perception of the silent sea of potentiality but continues further. Through proper development we begin to perceive that this sea is actually very structured. And even more importantly, this structure is not something mechanical (as scientists imagine some lifeless zero-point energy fluctuations) but is made of spiritual beings, at different levels of consciousness, that interfere creatively and create the flows and patterns within which our own life manifests. Our Higher Self is one such being there. We can never understand the human being, the tribes, the cultures, the existence of minerals, plants and animals, if we don't trace how they are being formed by the spiritual world. The physical world contains only the end result of this process. And this understanding is not simply some curiosity of the intellect. We simply can't solve the problems of our age without this understanding. Egoism and war are not created by matter. Neither they can be fixed by reorganizing physical relations. They are created by spiritual human beings who do not understand their structure, they don't know what they are made of (except for the physical corpse). The question of the so called evil, can only by addressed through deepening of our spiritual understanding. And it is precisely here that statements like "Let's be good, we are all one, love each other" simply don't work anymore.

Even Buddhism has its cosmology and speaks of gods and worlds. Modern practitioners rarely ask at what point, on the gradient between self and no-self state, one becomes conscious of these beings. Not much is said also about how can there be individual gods within the spiritual realm if that realm is supposed to be a soup of oneness. These are exactly the points where our thinking, because of impatience, smears out very important questions and imagines mixed up oneness. There's a very thin line between between oneness and blissful ignorance.

All this hints that we have much to learn about the spiritual world and that the One Universal Dream is only but a useful approximation, as we approach it from distance. I gave an analogy elsewhere - as long as we are far away, we can say "forest" but once we enter the woods we need also the concepts of the individual trees. Otherwise we bump into them without realizing what's going on. This is the stage of humanity today. We are getting deeper and deeper into our spiritual nature and for this reason we need to talk more and more concretely about it. The understanding of the etheric and astral body, the soul organs (chakras) are such concrete details. But what's important is that these things are no longer spoken of as some abstract ideas but everything must be found and verified as first-person experience.

[Lou Gold]

Even Buddhism has its cosmology and speaks of gods and worlds.

Well. I think I agree with some of your drift and then I arrive at a statement like above and I, who am not a Buddhist, know that this is true for Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism and not so for Zen.

...once we enter the woods we need also the concepts of the individual trees.

I have lots of first hand personal experience with the forest and I can tell you for sure that it's vastly more important to grok the fungal structure under the trees than the trees themselves. I agree with Jung about the critical need to face the underworld, which is generally distracted from by dreams of what's going on in an exalted above.

Where we agree (perhaps) is that the present weakness of an Idealism that leaps from individual whirlpools to M@L is the lack of structure. As in the case of the forest, I have some experience in the astral where there are also structures -- collective networks of interbeing that give meaning and purpose to the journey, which must be experienced by the individual but can be lived only co-creatively in connectivity.

Knowing that the map is not the territory, may you be blessed with a good journey.